America is known as the land of the free, but how would one define the people of America? For a long time, immigrants have arrived to the American shores with the goal of quickly assimilating into the culture of the country. Family names were changed and parents insisted that only English be spoken in the home. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Most of today’s immigrants wish to maintain their own cultural identities. They’re not only identifying more with their own ethnicity then other immigrants did before them in the past, but nowadays looking ethnically is quickly becoming popular.
In the text “No Speak English” by Sandra Cisneros we meet a woman, who’s called Mamacita by her neighbors. If she should be placed in one of the two immigrant groups (the generation in the past and the present one), she would probably belong to the newer generation. Her son worked two jobs to bring her and her younger child to the country, but when Mamacita finally arrives, she never leaves the house. It’s not because she’s to fat to emerge - she’s rather afraid of speaking, maybe even learning, English. She has left her own cultural identity with her pink house in her former country, and the language is the only link she has left. She misses her own country too much and refuses to learn the American way of life. She sits by the window, listens to Spanish radio, and just wishes to go home. The narrators’ father easily recognizes Mamacitas’ struggles from his own arrival to the United States, and explains how hard it is to live in America without knowing English. When he first arrived, the only food he knew was “harmandeggs”, so he had to eat harmandeggs three times a day. It horrifies Mamacita when her child starts speaking English, and she still can’t understand the language. She tries to command him “No speak English”, but it breaks her heart when he imitate the television anyway and learns English. The American dream is not Mamacitas’ dream; to her it’s a nightmare.
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